Fiscal Year Refresher - Part 2: Optimizing, Summarizing, And Purging

Optimizing a Fiscal Year:

The option to optimize fiscal years does not remove any transaction detail from the database. Instead, it adds a summarized transaction set to the fiscal year to speed up reporting. (It's much quicker to use summarized information during the calculations run in reports.) You can still add new transactions to optimized years, but doing so will drop the optimized portion from the year. They can be re-optimized later, of course. This option is only available for fiscal years two or more years old. Optimization is performed on open fiscal years only. The pre-close process also optimizes a fiscal year, so closed fiscal years will all have been optimized along the way.

Summarizing a Fiscal Year:

While optimizing fiscal years adds summary information without removing transaction detail, the option to summarize fiscal years does in fact actually remove all transaction detail for the year, leaving only summarized information behind. It is only possible to summarize a closed fiscal year. Once a fiscal year has been summarized, reports can only be run based on beginning balances, ending balances, or net change for project, class, and transaction code distributions for each fiscal period.

Purging a Fiscal Year:

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The option to purge fiscal years is probably the biggest, reddest button of all. It actually flushes all of the information about a given fiscal year out of the database entirely. Before purging a fiscal year, you should run all financial statements and save or print copies to keep for your records. Once you've purged a fiscal year it is not recoverable (except by restoring to a backup taken prior to the purge). Again, we're only able to perform the purge action for closed fiscal years. Both summarizing and purging are options made available for you to remove excess data from the database.

If you're looking for more information about end of year processes, take a look at our End of Year Guide for The Financial Edge (PDF). It covers processes you'll perform within the General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Payroll, and Student Billing modules.